Make your own bacon
It’s easy and satisfying
My daughter was reading
Highlights for Children magazine last month, and she got to the brain-stretching questions section.
“What are some things people can buy that they might choose to make instead?” she read aloud.
“Bacon,”
I replied. It was true: I had two kinds of homemade bacon curing in the
fridge at the time. It was an experiment, designed to answer a
brain-teaser of my own.
Some
of my friends are very into curing and smoking their own meats. Matt
Wright of the blog Wrightfood, for example, keeps homemade
salami and bresaola
hanging in his garage. (When he gets home from work, he pulls his car
into the garage and stops just as the hanging salami hits his
windshield. Just kidding.)
I, however, have a small apartment.
There will be no smoking or hanging here. (Coincidentally, that’s also
the sign on the wall at my local saloon.) So here was my
brain-stretching question: Could I make decent bacon using just the
refrigerator, the oven, and some simple ingredients?
First,
though, another question: Why would I want to make my own bacon when
there are dozens of good bacons on the market, including Nueske’s (our
family favorite) and the venerable
bacon-of-the-month club?
I can think of four reasons:
- Home baconry is easy. The pork spends a week in the fridge and a couple of hours in a low oven. That’s it.
- You can brag about it on Twitter.
- You can use the pork of your choice. I used kurobuta pork from my local Asian supermarket. You could also visit your butcher or farmers’ market. You might need to preorder pork belly.
- While
good sliced bacon is common, good slab bacon is rare, and slab bacon is
astonishingly useful. You can throw a chunk of it into a pot of baked beans. You can cut it into lardons and use them in frisée salad or boeuf bourguignon or stewed greens. And you can braise it and make the world’s best pasta all’amatriciana, courtesy of The Zuni Cafe Cookbook.
Bacon
is nothing more than cured and smoked pork belly. Both of those
adjectives put me in touch with ingredients that have rarely come into
my kitchen before.
The “cured” part comes from
sodium nitrite.
Nitrates and nitrites
have a bad reputation as health risks and cosmetic additives. Most
people who have heard of them probably think they’re a creation of the
industrial food complex, like
yellow #5.
Nothing could be
further from the truth. Nitrates and nitrites (in the form of saltpeter, which is
potassium nitrate)
have been used to preserve meat for centuries, and probably since
prehistoric times. They are as much a traditional food as carrots.
I’ve
eaten some good bacon cured only with salt, but it was heavily smoked.
Generally, I prefer the flavor you get from a bit of pink salt, which is
salt with added sodium nitrite. I buy it from
Butcher & Packer, where it’s known as
DQ Curing Salt. One teaspoon per three pounds of meat is about right, which means my half-pound bag of pink salt will last me until 2028.
As for the “smoked” part, let’s talk about the Great Bacon Controversy:
liquid smoke.
Do you have any barbecue people in your life, people who use the phrase
“low and slow” a lot? They are good people to know, but mention liquid
smoke and actual smoke will come out of their ears. It’s like telling a
Texan you
put beans in your chili.
Oddly
enough, liquid smoke is also all-natural: it’s made by burning wood
chips and filtering the smoke through water. It does not, however, make
your bacon taste like it was applewood-smoked for hours in an old oil
drum behind the barn. It makes your bacon taste like, well, fakin’
bacon.
I say that like it’s a bad thing. Not necessarily. If
you’re going to use liquid smoke, don’t try to emulate an austere
double-smoked country bacon. Instead, take a cue from
bacon candy. Following a recipe from the book
Jam It, Pickle It, Cure It, I made a
sweet bacon rubbed with molasses and brown sugar and finished it with liquid smoke. It’s the bacon equivalent of a
sea-salt caramel, and my daughter pronounced it “beautiful.” So there.
As
for my other homemade bacon, it was done with a simple dry rub (salt,
curing salt, a touch of sugar), and it was too simple. I’m still eating
it, of course — last night it went into
spaghetti all’amatriciana, with tomatoes and onions — but next I’m going to try a more pancetta-like cure, with garlic, nutmeg, and black pepper.
While it’s curing, I’ll work on some of those other things people can buy that they might choose to make instead, like
caramel sauce.
